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Many microRNAs (miRNAs) have been identified as being involved in diabetes; however, the question of which ones may be the most promising therapeutical targets still needs more investigation. This study aims to understand the overall development tendency and identify a specific miRNA molecule to attenuate diabetes. We developed a combined analysis method based on bibliometrics and bioinformatics to visualize research institutions, authors, cited references, and keywords to identify a promising target for diabetes. Our data showed that diabetes-related miRNA is receiving continuously increasing attention, with a large number of publications, indicating that this is still a hot topic in diabetes research. Scientists from different institutions are collaborating closely in this field. miR-21, miR-146a, miR-155, and miR-34a are frequently mentioned as high-frequency keywords in the related references. Moreover, among all the above miRNAs, bioinformatics analysis further strengthens the argument that miR-21 is the top significantly upregulated molecule in diabetes patients and plays an important role in the pathogenesis of diabetes. Our study may provide a way to identify targets and promote the clinical translation of miRNA-related therapeutical strategies for diabetes, which could also indicate present and future directions for research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, titanium and its alloys have emerged as the predominant metallic biomaterials for orthopedic implants. Nonetheless, the relatively high post-operative infection rate (2–5%) exacerbates patient discomfort and imposes significant economic costs on society. Hence, urgent measures are needed to enhance the antibacterial properties of titanium and titanium alloy implants. The titanium dioxide nanotube array (TNTA) is gaining increasing attention due to its topographical and photocatalytic antibacterial properties. Moreover, the pores within TNTA serve as excellent carriers for chemical ion doping and drug loading. The fabrication of TNTA on the surface of titanium and its alloys can be achieved through various methods. Studies have demonstrated that the electrochemical anodization method offers numerous significant advantages, such as simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and controllability. This review presents the development process of the electrochemical anodization method and its applications in synthesizing TNTA. Additionally, this article systematically discusses topographical, chemical, drug delivery, and combined antibacterial strategies. It is widely acknowledged that implants should possess a range of favorable biological characteristics. Clearly, addressing multiple needs with a single antibacterial strategy is challenging. Hence, this review proposes systematic research into combined antibacterial strategies to further mitigate post-operative infection risks and enhance implant success rates in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the fully convolutional network has achieved great success in semantic segmentation, lots of works have been proposed to extract discriminative pixel representations. However, the authors observe that existing methods still suffer from two typical challenges: (i) The intra‐class feature variation between different scenes may be large, leading to the difficulty in maintaining the consistency between same‐class pixels from different scenes; (ii) The inter‐class feature distinction in the same scene could be small, resulting in the limited performance to distinguish different classes in each scene. The authors first rethink semantic segmentation from a perspective of similarity between pixels and class centers. Each weight vector of the segmentation head represents its corresponding semantic class in the whole dataset, which can be regarded as the embedding of the class center. Thus, the pixel‐wise classification amounts to computing similarity in the final feature space between pixels and the class centers. Under this novel view, the authors propose a Class Center Similarity (CCS) layer to address the above‐mentioned challenges by generating adaptive class centers conditioned on each scenes and supervising the similarities between class centers. The CCS layer utilises the Adaptive Class Center Module to generate class centers conditioned on each scene, which adapt the large intra‐class variation between different scenes. Specially designed Class Distance Loss (CD Loss) is introduced to control both inter‐class and intra‐class distances based on the predicted center‐to‐center and pixel‐to‐center similarity. Finally, the CCS layer outputs the processed pixel‐to‐center similarity as the segmentation prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model performs favourably against the state‐of‐the‐art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The aim of the study was to observe the effect of acupuncture on regulating interleukin (IL)‐17, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)‐ɑ, and aquaporins (AQPs) in Sjögren's syndrome (SS) on patients and on non‐obese diabetic (NOD) models. Methods: Levels of anti‐AQP 1, 5, 8, and 9 antibodies, IL‐17, and TNF‐ɑ in the serum of SS patients were compared prior and following 20 acupuncture treatment visits during 8 weeks. While in murine model, five groups were divided to receive interventions for 4 weeks, including control, model, acupuncture, isoflurane, and hydroxychloroquine. The submaxillofacial gland index, histology, immunohistochemistry of AQP1, 5, salivary flow, together with IL‐17, and TNF‐ɑ expression in peripheral blood were compared among the groups. Results: Acupuncture reduced IL‐17, TNF‐ɑ, and immunoglobin A levels, and numeric analog scale of dryness in 14 patients with SS (p < 0.05). The salivary flow was increased, and the water intake decreased in NOD mice receiving acupuncture treatments. IL‐17 and TNF‐ɑ levels in peripheral serum were down‐regulated (p < 0.05) and AQP1, 5 expression in the submandibular glands up‐regulated in mice. Conclusion: The effect on relieving xerostomia with acupuncture may be achieved by up‐regulating the expression of AQP1. AQP5, down‐regulating levels of IL‐17 and TNF‐ɑ, and a decrease in inflammation of glands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using manually collected data in Chinese-listed firms from year 2008 to 2018, this paper studies that how does teacher-turned businessperson curb or improve accrual-based earning management and real activities manipulation. Results show that top management team (TMTs) with academic experience manage earning less through accruals and manipulating real operating activities. Further studies show that when firms with no-big4 auditors or less analysts tracking, TMTs with (out) foreign experience or political connection, the inhibition of academic experience on the earning management is more pronounced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2005 to 2010, also known in China as the “Eleventh Five-Year period," Chinese historians published over 200 books and approximately 470 articles about ancient world history. Several academic forums were held to further the research of world history, including the “Third China World Ancient History International Forum” (2005), the “Japan-Korea-China World History Research Forum” (2007), and “Ancient Country Origin and Early Development Forum” (2009). The article discusses research in the following areas: 1 Ancient Greek history; 2 Ancient Roman history; and 3 Ancient Eastern history. This third category includes the histories of Egypt, western Asia, and India. The majority of research has been on ancient Greek and Roman history. Research on ancient Egypt and Asia lacks vigor and needs to be enhanced.

Under the influence of the laws of Pharaonic Egypt, Greece and other parts of the Near East, Ptolemaic Egypt implemented two legal systems, one applied to local Egyptians and the other to immigrants. Little conflict occurred between the two systems. However, in the event of any problem that neither system could solve or a situation that threatened the interests of the king and the ruling class, the king would act as an arbiter and issue decrees or edicts targeting the specific problem or situation. In this way, the two systems were in effect in harmony. This applies to Ptolemaic judicial organs, judicial proceedings and adjudication. This kind of legal and judicial system to a large extent protected the interests of the weak, punished wrongdoers and maintained the stability of society. However, the Ptolemaic law was always under the control of the king and embodied his personal wishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kingship and Despotism have been the important theoretical problems all the time. However, few studies have deeply studied the relation between Kingship and Despotism by reviewing the developments of the public power in ancient Egypt so far. Through the examination of the concepts of Kingship and Despotism with discussing the developments of the public power in ancient Egypt, this article has revealed the ultimate relation between Kingship and Despotism, and held that Kingship can grow to Despotism in some cases, and that Despotism would sometimes represent some individual characters for some reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving boundary segmentation results has recently attracted increasing attention in the field of semantic segmentation. Since existing popular methods usually exploit the long-range context, the boundary cues are obscure in the feature space, leading to poor boundary results. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional boundary loss (CBL) for semantic segmentation to improve the performance of the boundaries. The CBL creates a unique optimization goal for each boundary pixel, conditioned on its surrounding neighbors. The conditional optimization of the CBL is easy yet effective. In contrast, most previous boundary-aware methods have difficult optimization goals or may cause potential conflicts with the semantic segmentation task. Specifically, the CBL enhances the intra-class consistency and inter-class difference, by pulling each boundary pixel closer to its unique local class center and pushing it away from its different-class neighbors. Moreover, the CBL filters out noisy and incorrect information to obtain precise boundaries, since only surrounding neighbors that are correctly classified participate in the loss calculation. Our loss is a plug-and-play solution that can be used to improve the boundary segmentation performance of any semantic segmentation network. We conduct extensive experiments on ADE20K, Cityscapes, and Pascal Context, and the results show that applying the CBL to various popular segmentation networks can significantly improve the mIoU and boundary F-score performance.